Missing Software
by The World Outside
Summary: (Set after 'White Hole'- inspired by fan-art by @i-fought-space on Tumblr) Kryten's memory of trying to restore Holly's IQ to 6000 wasn't wiped like the others by the White Hole closing, resulting in a last attempt to return her to the former glorious computer on-board Red Dwarf. Unfortunately, when the plan backfired, he turned Holly into... a human.


" _Maybe this isn't a good idea. I could get into trouble from Mr Rimmer if he finds me in here fiddling with this stuff_."

"What isn't a good idea, Kryten?"

Kryten jumped back and fell into the chair behind him at the realisation he wasn't alone in the room, and tried to quickly answer the voice which overheard him unintentionally babbly to himself.

"OH HOLLY! I'm so glad you are okay after yesterday's… after yesterdays near scare with the dirty sonars! You never know, a speck of dirt from the screens could have travelled into your system and wiped your memory completely! Aren't you glad I decided to dust them just in time?!"

"What are you talking about Kryten? Nothing happened yesterday with dirty sonar screens, or my computer data! And they call me senile."

There wasn't really a problem with a build-up of dust particles; it was just a simple ploy to side track Holly from finding out the real reason why Kryten was there. But an event from the previous day was, in fact, why he was in the computer drive room, looking over Holly's personality and data files.

A 'White Hole' had emerged around the same time that the crew were preparing to restore Holly's IQ back to its former glory, but when the process backfired, leaving her with only 3 minutes of run time, the boys were left to devise a plan to escape impending doom. When they finally sorted out the situation and managed to close the hole, the reverse pull of the hole closing in on itself effected everyone on the ship by erasing the time period spent fixing Holly's intelligence, removing its existence and memory from their minds. All except Kryten's.

"Oh, a speck of dirt must have gotten into your memory banks! Whatever shall we do! I should probably take a look at your hard drives to see if I can fix the problem…" Kryten adjusted himself out of the chair and knelt down onto the floor, searching through his 'conveniently placed' toolbox, until he found a small Philips head screwdriver, to unscrew and detach the panel that guarded Holly's circuit boards, from underneath the main station in the room.

"What are you trying to do, assassinate me?! HEY DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING! I'm a highly sophisticated and expensive piece of equipment you know!"

It was obvious that he wasn't the first person that had opened the compartment to check its contents were in working order. There was various parts of Holly's internal contents that had distinctive black marker scribbles labelled 'Property of A. , BSc. SSc.', and the odd pile of cigarette ash with a bud or two left behind from when Lister tried to access the computer's mainframe to memorise every detail of Kristine Kochanski's wild teenage years. Kryten began to slowly pull out long strands of cable, wire, a ping pong ball, a pair of men's gym socks, the empty cassette case for 'Jim Bexley's Greatest Hits', and spare set of fluffy dice.

"Of course not, ma'am. Why would think such a thing of a service mechanoid? We are incapable of such aggressive behaviour and are unable to bring harm to any lifeforms."

"I know what else you are incapable of; being able to lie to an 'incompetent' 3 billion year old computer with a decreased IQ. Are you going to tell me the truth or will I bring the boys in to our little party we have going on in here?"

"What makes you think I am lying to you?"

He began to search further within the computer tower to find the RAM and expansion cards that were installed when the JMC crew were all accounted for, with someone who regularly upgraded her service parts. It was quite apparent that nothing new had been integrated in the time it was just the 4 crew members. If it was possible for Holly to lose memory from specks of dust, she wouldn't be able to remember a single ounce of information by now with the amount of grime Kryten was trying to wipe away to read their labels. He almost felt compelled to get out his feather duster right there and then.

"Your leg starts twitching uncontrollably whenever you try to lie to someone."

Looking out back into the room outside of the internal tower, he could see his leg was twitching and shaking inadvertently out of control, until it finally detached from his hip and started wiggling its way across the floor towards the exit.

"HEY, YOU GET BACK HERE YOU COWARD!" Kryten quickly reversed out from under the table, stood up unbalanced with only one leg for support, and hopped his way across the room and grabbed the detached leg before it was able to make a swift exit.

"You think you could just avoid the situation we are in by detaching yourself huh? I wish all of us body parts could just curl into a ball and escape this too, but that's not how this works!" He quickly detained a firm grip on the uncontrollable limb and reattached it to his hip with a click, but swiveled around just to be startled by Holly glaring straight at his direction with a displeased look in her eyes.

"Kryten, you are going to tell me what you are searching my computer tower for, otherwise you will not be allowed to continue with your duties as a service mechanoid."

"What do you mean?"

"I will tell the crew that there is to be no more cleaning schedules that you control…"

"Ahh…"

"…every ounce of cleaning will be done by either crew or scutters…"

"God no!"

"*whispers*… you won't even be able to do laundry…"

"NOOOOOO! OK I'LL TALK! JUST PLEASE DON'T MAKE THEM DO MY LAUNDRY SER-VI-CESSSSS!"

Holly began to smirk with pleasure as she had finally cracked Kryten enough for him to tell her what he had been doing to her system.

"So… why have you been looking in my hard drives and ripping out bits and bobs from my tower, hnm?"

"{Lie Mode Cancel} Oh Ma'am, it all started yesterday!"

"Yesterday? Kryten I have told you nothing happened…"

"Yes it did! You don't know what happened because a white hole wiped your memory along with the others! It was supposed to wipe my memory too, but it merely restarted my functions. The event had already been saved from my RAM processes to my internal hard drives."

"So what happened then?"

After a few minutes of explanation, everything from the previous day had suddenly made more sense. Holly had become curious as to why she had no recollection from the day before, or when Kryten had actually entered the room in fact, since he had been working with her data files from the wee hours of the morning.

"But didn't you say restoring my IQ didn't work, and the presence of the white hole was to blame for losing so much of the precious 3 minutes I had left to live?"

"Yes that was the case, but after the first initial hour of being restarted, I found a solution to fixing your senility and restoring you to your former glory."

"How do you think you can achieve it?"

"Well, like I mentioned before. Essentially it will be the same sort of processes that we initially tried, but without the intelligence compression. The basis of the first attempt was to diminish your run time in order to improve your IQ, therefore making your smarter; but this time it would be a compression of a different force from data files."

"And what force would that be exactly?"

"I know this will be hard to understand, but your visual presence will need to be switched off for this to assumedly work, ma'am."

Kryten was expecting Holly to be somewhat disappointed at the idea of her visual presence being switched off for the duration of this experiment to see if he could actually improve her IQ once again, but her reaction was somewhat opposite.

"So you and the boys won't be able to see me… well, my chosen projection, anymore?"

"Precisely."

"… I guess it's all in the name of experimentation. We have to take risks. Let's just hope this plan of yours works. I mean, it's just my 'face' and all. I'll still be me and will be here, with a voice, if it all goes wrong." Holly sighed.

"That's the spirit, Holly! There is just one more thing I need to speak to you about."

"What's that?"

"The codes can only be manually adjusted by the computer itself. I cannot enter these codes myself, but I can tell you the sequences verbally and you can enter them into your systems and drives."

A faint look of fear fell over Holly's face. What if this didn't work? What if she got the sequences wrong; entered them upside down or back to front. Would she still exist if something happened?

"Ahhh… sure. I can do that. When do we start?"

"Now if you would like?"

"Okay… just… just tell me what to do."

For the next hour, they set up do-dads, blobs and blibs, pulled out various components of the tower and put new things in, sometimes mixing things up with curry container trays by accident. After a while, all of the preparation was complete. All of the drives, disks, codes, sequences and pretty screen savers were fully functional and were ready to be activated.

"Alright. Everything seems to be functioning as it should be. We have tested all the features in situation analysis and there seems to be zero faults. I'll just go call the other's in to witness this extraordinary event!"

"NO! I mean… why do they need to be in here?"

Holly wasn't against the idea of an audience, but she was incredibly nervous. She knew the consequences of what would happen if this went wrong. She would never see her friends again, and they would never see her again; in some ways it was more comforting to her if she remembered what they looked like the last time they all spoke to her, then to witness their shocked looks as her visual being was erased, along with her visual abilities.

"I thought you would like some company, and I am certain they would feel very hurt if I didn't tell them about this event and just proceeded."

"Well, think about it Kryten. If this goes wrong, you will only need to wipe my memory again, which is fairly simple, compared to wiping the whole lot of us, which involves heavy medical sedatives for Lister and the Cat if they were here. You don't want to put them through that again do you?"

"No ma'am. I guess you are right. Oh well, if all goes to plan, they will know straight away; this procedure gives out a short drain of power for it to function, and if I am correct, they are half way through a women's mud wrestling DVD marathon in the captains lounge that must not be disturbed!"

"So let's just get on with it. Give me the code commands."

"Okay then. Let me open the correct system file that holds the command codes… ahh here it is. Are you ready?"

Holly gave an uneasy nod and closed her 'eyes' to access her mainframe database.

 ** _Command code input: please enter command sequence_**

"[/10GAI-HOLLY] at 21:47 /next: [IMMEDIATE] /interactive: CREW [KRYTEN, LISTER, CAT]"

 ** _Please enter command code._**

"Command code "norbtmrphs/IMMEDIATE" … no wait, that one's not right…"

 ** _Command code accepted. Subject Command code "norbtmrphs"- Nano Robotic Metamorphism._**

"NO! NO, THAT'S NOT THE RIGHT ONE HOLLY! I GOT MY NANO ROBOTICS FILE MIXED UP WITH THE SYSTEM FILES, YOU CAN'T USE THAT!"

 ** _Command function activated. Circuitry advancement initialized._**

A bright white light from underneath the tower desk burst out and startled Kryten as he stepped back from the buzzing computer, churning all the power from the surrounding sector of the ship. The glow turned from white to a light blue and started to creep up through the power lines and wires behind the monitors and around the walls. Holly's eyes blared open at the pure velocity of the power sources she had been sucking the ship's electricity from.

"KRYTEN WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?! WHAT WAS THE CODE YOU INITIALIZED?!"

She began to panic, realizing that Kryten's mistake might now formally cost them her life. Even if she was just a hologramatic computer on a barren ship, 3 million years away from its destination, she still had to get back to Earth and finish her mission to save not only Lister, but the others too. She didn't want to die, or anything of that equivalent. Did Silicon Heaven apply to her? Did it exist like Kryten had believed?

Large bangs of explosions and small sparks of electricity rocketed from her motherboard, and bright flashes of light blurred her vision, but she also noticed her vision was deteriorating at a rapid speed.

"KRYTEN! KRYTEN! I'M LOSING MY SIGHT AND I THINK MY HEARING… IF YOUR STILL THERE, TELL THE OTHER'S… GOODBYE… for me.."

A loud BANG and all of the power to the ship was gone. A glow of warm maroon light was the only thing that lit the room until it to fell dim into the darkness that now swallowed the rest of Red Dwarf.

"HOLLY... Holly, are you ok?"

There was no answer.

"Oh Holly… I am so sorry…"

Kryten was left alone sitting in the dark. He was lucky there was a night vision adjustment to his spare set of eyes. It wasn't until a few minutes later, he started to hear the faint calls of the others coming down the corridor with their flashlights and bazookaoids ready.

"Kryten, what the smeg happened here?! What happened to Holly?!"

"Oh Mr Lister sir! I… I'm…"

"Spit it out Gimboid!"

"Rimmer shut it, ok! Kryten, tell us what happened? Why is the power out and why is Holly turned off?"

"She's not turned off, sir. She's dead."

A silence fell across the dark room. If the lights were on, the only faces that could be seen would be distraught and saddened by the loss of a good friend. Holly was more than just a friend. She was like the parent of the family they made up. Her senility was no match for their admiration for her, even against all of the jokes.

The first movement was of Cat's heavy footstep towards the tower as he pointed his flashlight to the monitor which once held Holly's visual presence. A further step resulted in a small squeal of sound from the floor underneath his Cuban heeled shoes. He quickly pounced back a step after realising he had stepped in something. Or on something.

"What was that? Cat, did you step on something slimy?"

"No, it felt squidgy, but not slimy. The noise didn't come from underneath my foot, but to the right of it."

"Well shine a light at it, would'ya!"

All at the same time, Cat, Lister and Rimmer shone their torches down to the end of where Cat's foot had stepped to find… a small hand.

"Who the hell is that?!"

"It looks like a woman's hand, Lister. But there aren't any women on the ship anymore."

"You never know Rimmer, it could be Kochanski! She could have been created in that power explosion!"

"Sir's, I don't think it's Kochanski. Shine a light on her face."

Cat moved his light beam down from the hand to the right of the arm, to a beautiful pale face… with blonde hair.

"HOLLY!" Lister cried. "It's you! You're… human?!"

Cat fell back onto the floor in astonishment before crawling over to Holly. Her forehead was covered in a light trail of blood from being thrown from the computer monitor. She was slipping into unconsciousness and didn't seem to be bothered by the pool of blood down the left side of her face. But Cat was adamant on moving her to somewhere safe. He slowly got up to kneeling on the floor and began gathering her limbs tighter into her slim frame.

"Come on, buds. She needs to go the medical bay! Help me lift her."


End file.
